Fearlessly blogging the intersections of technology, education, and life.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Democrats as Alpha Males

So the New York Times has decided that the reason democrats won some key congressional seats is because they recruited some macho guys to run. They use my own home state as an example:

The fruits of those efforts arrived in Washington last week. Take, for example, three House freshman from Pennsylvania. Patrick Murphy, the son of a Philadelphia police officer, was a West Point professor, a prosecutor and an Iraq war veteran before he ran for Congress. Chris Carney was a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserves. Joe Sestak is a former Navy vice admiral whose last job was commanding 15,000 sailors and dozens of ships and aircraft for operations in Afghanistan.

“Joe Sestak — that guy’s muscular!” says Mr. Lapp. “He’s a vice admiral. I’ve told him to spend a lot of time going on the national talk shows. He can really do a service changing the mold and the way the Democratic Party is viewed.”

I don't know Chris Carney, but I've seen Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak several times up close and personal and I wouldn't characterize either one of them as macho. Sestak is rather small in stature and a bit soft spoken and both Murphy and Sestak seem to think with their hearts as opposed to other parts of their anatomy. Those are not negative qualities in my mind, but I think saying that because someone served in the military or likes football makes them macho is a mistake. There's more to a personality than past work experience.

Lizza thinks the predominance of macho men might be a problem for women's issues. I don't think this is necessarily the case. Murphy and Sestak both ran on issues important to women such as health care and pro choice. Maybe most of their issues weren't specific to women, but I don't think we need to worry too much about these macho men inisisting women stay at home.